Stepping Beyond, In, and With JAEPL: Twenty Years of Hope

In Animal Dreams, a complex narrative of place and identities, Barbara Kingsolver speaks to the human need to live inside hope. Twenty years and twenty volumes of JAEPL attests to that need, for, rather than admire hope “from a distance,” the journal “live[d] right in it, under its roof” (306). Throughout its pages, via articles, style, and spirit, it embodied as well as articulated the dreams and aspirations of its parent organization. In this retrospective honoring the journal—helmed initially by Alice Glarden Brand (Volumes 1-3), then by Kristie S. Fleckenstein and Linda T. Calendrillo (Volumes 4-15),1 and currently by Joonna Smitherman Trapp and Brad Peters (Volumes 16-ongoing)—I mark three intertwined hopes and tropes that have circulated throughout JAEPL’s pages.2 First, we have longed to define and validate ourselves as a legitimate field of study by stepping beyond the accepted parameters of literacy studies and, by so doing enrich, if not transform, teacher-scholars, classrooms, and students. Second, we have at the same stepped in, aspiring to connect not only to each other in the spirit of community but also to “the inner landscape of the teaching self ” (Palmer 4). And, third, we have stepped with the larger discipline within which we situate ourselves, returning to literacy studies writ large to nurture and celebrate the shifting center of reading-writing education. As the pages of JAEPL reveals, we have lived inside these hopes for two decades, hopes that resonate to disciplinary change and teacher-scholar’s dreams.